Free The Phoenix in Flight by Sherwood Smith, Dave Trowbridge

crater whose jagged walls
vented huge jets of flaring gas. An ardent spark of light deep within the vast
wound blossomed into a fierce glare that blacked out the imagers. Eusabian’s
skin prickled as radiation slashed through the corvette’s shields, and then the
fiveskip engaged and hurled them to safety and the long voyage back to
Dol’jhar...
    The Quarantine Monitor faded swiftly as its circumpolar
orbit took it higher, and Eusabian’s gaze shifted to the distant volcano.
Around him the tower shuddered and groaned momentarily; as the gravitors
compensated for the rolling quake, his fingers grasped another knot in the
dirazh’u.
    There was no longer night in Jhar D’Ocha. The planetary
Shield, almost fully excited by the relentless hammering of the Panarchist
battlecruiser, now wrapped the planet in a coruscating aurora from poles to
equator.
    But there was no longer day, either. The fulgent display
at the edge of space penetrated only dimly the clouds of ash exploding from the
volcanoes at the heart of Jhar D’Ocha. The planet’s crust was beginning to
resonate, provoking the karra fires to a level of activity they had not seen
for centuries. The ground shuddered almost continuously now, punctuated by
fiercer spasms.
    Another blow from space—a distortion in spacetime
itself—shivered through the Avatar’s bones, followed almost immediately by a
violent temblor that wrenched viciously at Hroth D’Ocha. Eusabian could hear
the crash of falling masonry but could see nothing of the city below, now
half-buried in ash and pocked with craters from falling ejecta.
    And Jhar D’Ocha’s plight was not the worst of it;
elsewhere pyroclastic flows and tsunamis had claimed countless victims. But
Eusabian would not order the Shield down. The Avatar did not surrender; to do
so would prove him a false vessel of Dol. The Panarchists must batter it down,
no matter the cost ...
    Twenty years later, Karra D’Ocha, and volcanoes all over
Dol’jhar, had yet to settle back into somnolence. Air flight was still
difficult. Machinery wore out quickly, and agriculture, never very fruitful,
had become even more marginal. Eusabian blinked as light flared from the
distant volcano, a lightning-wreathed jet of gas spearing upwards, and his
fingers found another knot.
    The Shield had fallen, the resonance induced by the
battlecruiser’s punishment finally overwhelming the generator. The mind-numbing
blows from space had ceased, the trembling of the ground abating.
    But there had been no communication from the Panarchist
admiral in the almost ten days since. The Avatar knew that subordinate lords,
especially those that had fled back to Dol’jhar from planets in rebellion
following Acheront, had attempted contact, to no avail. He had not, waiting
with increasing confidence to see if his enemy would play out the struggle as
Eusabian hoped, the only way he could survive as Avatar.
    Then his answer arrived as a streak of light stabbing out
of the sky onto the spaceport northeast of Hroth D’Ocha, which blossomed into a
dome of light followed by a double concussion that was immediately overwhelmed
by a blast that shook the tower fortress like a chuqath with an arrachi in its jaws . Eusabian’s heart swelled with triumph as he
recognized in the timing, identical to the interval between the arrival of the
Trucial Commission after Acheront and the Karush-na Rahali that had swept it
away in a night of terror and vengeance, the answer he had hoped for.
    Even the report a few minutes later that every spaceport
on Dol’jhar had been simultaneously destroyed by kinetic strikes could not
dampen his exultation. The timing acknowledged his supremacy: they intended
further negotiation through him. He would remain Avatar.
    He dismissed the messenger, and as the door closed behind
the Bori, Eusabian lifted up his dirazh’u and began the weaving of his Great
Paliach. He knew not how he would accomplish this revenge upon his enemy, and
all his enemy held,